Right now those lanes were only spattered with vehicles, as many businesses, schools, and activities had been shut down because of the hurricane. But Saskia noticed the bubble of her drone getting dark again, signaling another AR sequence about to start. “Not much going on today,” T.R. remarked, “so I’m gonna take you on a little trip down memory lane. This is the same day of the year, same stretch of freeway, as it was back in 2019.”
As he said it, the twenty-six lanes of the Katy Freeway suddenly filled up with cars and trucks, countless thousands of them, moving along at moderate speed—not quite a traffic jam, but still with enough brake lights igniting here and there to temper the flow. A motorcycle weaved through, going twice as fast as everyone else, using the bigger vehicles as pylons. The illusion was powerful even though the rendering had been simplified—every semi was a clone of a simple featureless semi model, and the same was true of cars, vans, pickups, and so on. But if anything that simplification made it easier to “read” the data. T.R. was showing them, in a way that was easy to grasp, exactly how much traffic had passed down this freeway at this time of day on this day of the year in 2019.
“2020,” T.R. said, and the display shifted. This time traffic was sparser, and moving faster. “The first pandemic. Now, 2021.” Another shift. More traffic moving more slowly—there was a traffic jam. “2022.” It sped up. “2023. 2024.” The lanes emptied out. “That was a hurricane year, just like this one. 2025. You’ll notice a change taking hold,” T.R. said, as the years ticked upward, “as self-driving cars take over. In heavy traffic, they drive closer together, almost like they join together into a train. So we can fit more vehicles onto the same stretch of pavement and those vehicles are all going faster—much greater throughput! Here, I’ll flip between 2019 and 2029 and that’ll make it easy to see.”
He did so, and it was. The flow depicted in 2019 was gappy and spasmodic. Ten years later the cars were moving the way everyone was accustomed to nowadays, following one another closely, adapting smoothly to lane changes and merges. Saskia had lived through that transformation and was aware that it had happened but had never seen it demonstrated so vividly.
“So just when the Greens might be fixing to dance on the grave of the automobile, software crams twice as many of the little buggers onto the roads, makes the commute safer and easier for everyone. Guess what? People buy more cars! Burn more fuel. T.R. Mick’s makes more money, builds more mobility centers on all the new highways getting laid down to carry all those cars.”
The virtual display faded, the real world brightened. This whole time, the swarm had been humming eastward above the centerline of the Katy Freeway fast enough to overtake and pass the speediest vehicles. And yet, for all the distance they had covered, nothing had changed. The more Houston they put behind them, the more just rolled up over the western horizon to replace it. Like an infinite conveyor belt of mega-city.
“What kind of money we talking? That’s the question my daddy and his daddy always used to ask, looking at an oil field, trying to work out how much to pay, how much to invest. What kind of money we talking?”
They’d passed over an interchange the size of central Amsterdam, where the Katy crossed one of the inner, older ring roads. Now they were looking several miles out toward another, much newer and larger interchange. Saskia began to see features she had noticed lately on maps: the tall corporate-campus buildings of Energy Corridor, and the two large regions shown on maps as bodies of water. On satellite imagery they looked like forested parks. Today they actually did look like reservoirs, albeit very untidy ones. Instead of placid open water their surfaces were grubby with trees, and instead of neatly staying within bounds they had burst their levees and invaded the suburban developments that had ill-advisedly been constructed on surrounding land.
“The maps lie,” T.R. said, as they slowed, banking rightward off the freeway and approaching one of those reservoirs. “I’ll show you what the maps have to say about what we’re looking at right here.”
Once again the AR system did its thing, this time by superimposing a plain old Google Map on the landscape. This was the bare-bones version, like something from the first decade of the
twenty-first century. No satellite imagery, no traffic data, no overlays of any kind. Just roads in white, dry land in beige, and bodies of water in light blue. “Looks pretty tidy, don’t it?” T.R. scoffed. “Who makes these things? Anyone who lives down there knows that ain’t the real picture. Here’s the real picture.”